Best practice communication between healthcare professionals and patients involves using quality patient information leaflets (PILs). We assessed medical and physiotherapy students’ (N = 337) ability to appraise the readability, psychology theory content and quality of nine international smoking PILs. Flesch scores ranged from 52.8–79.7% (fairly difficult to fairly easy). Students identified components of the Health Belief Model (84–98%), Theory of Planned Behaviour (65–88%) and Transtheoretical Model (37–86%). Importantly, student-proposed additional theory-based content had no detrimental effect on readability scores. Overall quality scores indicated low–moderate quality. This assignment helped students critically evaluate the utility of PILs for communication.